SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 24 January 2025
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Lynch, David
(1946-2025) US actor, artist and musician and primarily filmmaker whose work extended Surrealism into mainstream Cinema and Television. Lynch's films tend to examine the uneasy truce between rationality and the unconscious mind by revealing how intimations of Sex, Identity and death make themselves felt in modern American communities. The term Lynchian was defined by David Foster ...
Powers, Tim
(1952- ) US author properly thought of as fundamentally a writer of fantasy, but who began his publishing career with two sf novels, the first being The Skies Discrowned (1976 as Timothy Powers; rev vt Forsake the Sky 1986 as Tim Powers), a fantasy-tinged adventure much influenced – as Powers stated in his introduction to the revised version – by the work of Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950). The second, Epitaph in Rust ...
Bicentennial Man
Film (1999). 1492 Pictures, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Laurence Mark Productions, Touchstone Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company). Directed by Chris Columbus. Starring Embeth Davidtz, Hallie Kate Eisenberg, Sam Neill, Oliver Platt, Stephen Root, Kiersten Warren, Robin Williams. Written by Nicholas Kazan from The Positronic Man (1992) by Isaac Asimov and Robert ...
Potocki, Jan
(1761-1815) Polish military engineer, ethnologist, linguist, traveller and author whose first stories – which show the influences of Arabian Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] – appeared in the 1780s, embedded into his travel books. He is best-known for Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse ["The Manuscript Found at Saragossa"], a complex text whose publication history is so convoluted ...
Savage Worlds
Role Playing Game (2003). Pinnacle Entertainment Group (PEG). Designed by Shane Lacy Hensley. / Like GURPS (1986), Savage Worlds is a generic system, designed to allow players to participate in worlds based on any literary genre, from science fiction to urban fantasy. But where GURPS emphasizes the accuracy with which it simulates fictional realities, Savage Worlds ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...